My First Year As A Professional Web Developer

At the beginning of this year, I finally reached my goal and landed my first job as a professional web developer. It wasn’t easy, especially since I did it in a foreign country with no degree in Computer Science. In this blog post, I want to share what I learned from my first twelve months as a professional web developer.

The Beginning

In January 2024, I was very lucky to get a chance to prove myself as a self-taught developer and immigrant in a foreign country through a six-month-long internship at a company in northern Thailand. Back in November 2023, I wrote an unsolicited application and got invited to two interviews. So I moved from Bangkok to Chiang Mai and signed a contract as a Full Stack Intern. Funnily enough, I didn’t know sh*t about the Back-End. I had just finished the Front-End course on The Odin Project and started with the basics of databases.

However, the boss decided that it was a good idea to give me some time (four weeks) to learn the basics of PHP and Laravel and then throw me straight into a project where I was solely responsible for building an API for a mobile application. The app let AI create stories with children as the main characters. Of course, I had a mentor who did all my code reviews, but I was still the only person responsible for building this API, and the app was supposed to be finished by March 2024.

In the first four weeks, I binge-watched Laracasts and coded along. I also created some very small side projects along the way on weekends to prepare for the upcoming project. I am still incredibly happy and thankful for the insanely well-written Laravel documentation that provides useful examples every time I need to look something up.

So, in the first three months, I basically learned the basics of Back-End technologies and some intermediate Git stuff while working on my first real-world project.

From Intern To Junior

Both my mentor and my boss were satisfied with my work, so my boss decided to assign me, as a Back-End developer, to another project: a completely free AI-comparison tool where users can test out different LLMs and compare them against each other. For this, I developed a custom middleware that connected to all the different APIs from OpenAI, Mistral, Google, Cohere, etc. — you name it. This tool was integrated into the company website and is still used by many people today. I have implemented over 100 models into this middleware so far. This project was launched in July 2024 and was a huge success for the company I worked for, and my mentor was very satisfied with the work I did. One day, my boss invited me to dinner and offered me a contract as a junior Back-End developer at the company.

The First Six Months As Junior

After my promotion to junior Back-End developer, I worked on two more projects: one where I developed an AI agent used internally in the company, and a chatbot mainly used to collect leads. In these projects, I focused on increasing the code quality and especially learned more about databases. By this, I mean working with and understanding indexes and how to properly structure databases.

I still make a lot of mistakes and need to learn a lot, but I think I have already improved significantly, especially compared to where I was twelve months ago. I think I can be pretty proud of myself.

My Goals For 2025

Going into 2025, my career goals are to get promoted to a mid-level role and to work more on improving my code quality and skills. Furthermore, I want to start freelancing and write more blog posts about code. This way, I can dive deeper into topics I am interested in and get a better understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes.

Frameworks like Laravel do a lot of heavy lifting, which is awesome. But they also hide a huge chunk of logic from you. If you don’t dive deeper and try to understand what is behind all those nice facades and functions, you can still build some pretty cool applications and do your job, but you won’t grow as a developer or as a person. This is why my personal task for 2025 is to get a deeper understanding of all these concepts that frameworks “hide.”

What are your goals for 2025?

Happy coding, and see you next year!